


Punch Drunk Irony

by Anonymous



Series: Write drunk, edit sober. [1]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, There's a tag I never expected to use in my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:35:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had never been an issue, exactly. Just an eccentricity, one piled on top of dozens of others. Sonia provided him with entire cups of espresso, knowing full and well that he would forget them a third of the way through and come back later. Michel would slap him across the shoulders with a little too much force, the sting on his back taking away some of the sting in his eyes. And everyone would know that the next day, he wasn’t coming in at all and would probably be asleep until the mid afternoon sun finally slanted through his bedroom window too aggressively to ignore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Punch Drunk Irony

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tumblr user coresilence](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=tumblr+user+coresilence).



Perhaps Sycamore’s favorite piece of irony was the way he consistently managed to tell his younger assistants, his superiors, and the few students who were still primarily under his tutelage now that he was no longer a lecturer about how important regular, scheduled sleep was. He was a biologist, after all, and while his specialization was certainly neither human not traditional, he knew the basics well enough. Regular sleep was paramount to all manner of processes in the human body, from digestion to oxygenation to mental elasticity. He never let those in his sphere of influence forget that.

This was, possibly, maybe, out of a misguided sense that he should stop them from doing the things he was always doing to himself. For example, telling himself one more hour, then another, and only realizing that the screens had become easier to read because the sun had come up when others began filtering into the labs.

It had never been an issue, exactly. Just an eccentricity, one piled on top of dozens of others. Sonia provided him with entire cups of espresso, knowing full and well that he would forget them a third of the way through and come back later. Michel would slap him across the shoulders with a little too much force, the sting on his back taking away some of the sting in his eyes. And everyone would know that the next day, he wasn’t coming in at all and would probably be asleep until the mid afternoon sun finally slanted through his bedroom window too aggressively to ignore.

A simple, systematic response, learned over years to account for his wildly inappropriate behavior. Not unlike the way everyone would overlook Blaise’s long ties and the way they were constantly presenting a fire hazard because so little of their research was in any way flammable. Or the fact that Liliane was constantly forgetting that she already had safety goggles in her hair and tended to commandeer all of them in any given room before sheepishly realizing later on.

Perhaps in other labs, in other regions or universities, these things would have presented more significant troubles, but here, they worked around each other with ease, integrating new abnormalities into their communal structure as if they were completely mundane. It was exceptionally helpful, given that the amount of vivacious energy that typified his research team could easily have boiled over into a mess of conflicting personalities and constant in-fighting.

Although eventually someone would need to talk to Blaise and Ellie about the, for lack of a better term, spite flirting. At the very least, they ought to go and inflict their passive- and less than passive- aggressive insults loaded with smog-thick sexual tension on the staff of a nice restaurant somewhere.

For most of the morning, things went precisely as expected. Michel smacked him every hour or so, Sonia ensured that there was always caffeine somewhere on hand and accessible, and things progressed as ever. Lamium, his darling Garchomp, had managed to sleep while in the analytic suspension spectrometer, and was happy to go through her morning paces in the park under Blaise’s observation. His notes suggested that she was likely close to gaining another level in ability. Perhaps this weekend, they would take a day trip to Couriway and train for a while.

What day was it, anyway? Thursday, probably?

He turned to ask Sonia, and misjudged his speed. The lab’s floors were not exactly slippery; that would have been detrimental to everyone’s health and half of them were self destructive enough as it was. But Sycamore, even in exhaustion, was prone to large gestures, and when his foot didn’t meet the ground quite as quickly as he’d expected, he was already pinwheeling towards the tile. Incongruously, he was distantly aware that it could use dust-mopping, no doubt because the custodial staff had tried to avoid interrupting him last night.

Then he was smacking into it face first. Well, not exactly face first. One of his hands had gotten pinned under his chest, and may, in fact, have hit the floor before his jaw. It was difficult to say.

Until the pain set in, at which point it immediately became much easier to determine. Definitely wrist first. The dull thud of his pulse in his chin was not nearly as pronounced as the sharp, bright spikes from there.

"Professor!" Came three matching cries, but it was Sonia who was the first, as ever, to come and save him from himself, swatting away Michel as he tried to turn Sycamore over. "You idiot, what if he’s hurt his neck! Then what will you do? Honestly!"

"No, no, ma petite, my neck is fine." Sycamore managed, once he was quite certain he hadn’t snapped off his tongue by mistake, though he could taste blood and realized belatedly that he must have bitten his cheek too. Lovely.

He started pulling himself up, and now Michel was helping to set him back on his feet, even as Sonia was glaring up at him with her fiercest doctoral expression. She had been a rapid response ranger, once upon a time, after all. It was a pity she didn’t have any pokémon whose biological signs reacted to the stones on hand, she certainly would not have had any difficulty challenging Korrina and-

"Are you even listening to me? You’re going home, right now, right this instant! You’re going to sleep for the rest of the day and the whole night, and you can come back tomorrow. Ellie, go and fetch Blaise and the Garchomp."

"Lamium," Sycamore corrected, tone worn smooth by constant repetition. Sonia was very particular about referring to poor Lamium as if she were a test subject. Psychological protection against future bias, she called it. Her glare appeared to grow sterner, and one eye might have been ticking ever so slightly.

"Is that blood? Dear Zekrom, professor, you are a full decade my senior! how is it that I have to be your mother?" Her accent was starting to slip as was her patience with his disorientation, and she swatted his shoulder fiercely. "Without hope, the lot-"

The gesture jostled Sycamore’s wrist, lacing staticky stings of pain through his arm, and he hissed, flinching away from her and moving to cradle it reflexively. The anger fell away immediately, replaced by cool professionalism, for which he was thankful, as she spread her hands in silent demand to see the damage.

Her fingers were cool and delicate, tracing over the discoloration lightly but with intent, and he knew she was watching to see the little tremors and aborted flinches that the examination brought out. With little warning, she had expanded on of her pokéballs, and in a flash of light, Eytey, her Eigyem, was staring up at them curiously with his alarmingly jeweltone eyes.

"Give him your wrist, please," She directed the professor in the distant tone common to all medical professionals. He obeyed reflexively, and barely hissed this time. Eytey was apparently familiar with this procedure, and placed his yellow and green fingers above and below the injury, before waiting for a command.

< _Thunder wave_ ,> Came the command, spoken in Unovan, as all her battle commands typically were. < _Gently, we’re looking for a broken ligament, not to set the muscles_. >

Having been only distantly aware of what to expect, Sycamore nearly flinched when the unnatural tingle of electricity started up, only to find he couldn’t, rooted in place and muscles locked. But then it was over as soon as it began, and Eytey was shaking his enormous head, which Sonia patted lightly. “You’ll be fine, just don’t move it too much, and put it on ice as soon as you can. I don’t suppose and of those Froakies from the starters program know anything Ice typed yet?”

Sycamore shook his head in response, any words he might have intended to offer having been swept up in Blaise’s entry, offering the Great ball that had served as Lamium’s home for the last several years. “Did you really break your arm, Prof?”

Sonia threw her hands up in obvious despair of anything ever getting done again, and rolled her eyes hugely. Eytey mimicked the action in as much as his stubby arms and lack of pupils enabled him to. “How could there possibly have been rumours in the past three minutes? Kalosians, < _I swear, you’re all completely crackers._ >”

"No, Blaise, just a sprain and an over-enthusiastic first responder demanding I go sleep it off."

< _And wra_ ->, Sonia shook her head and started again. “And wrap it, you absolute moron.”

"Of course, ma poulette, when would I ever disobey your esteemed medical advice?"

< _And now with the chickens. Why did I come here, there were perfectly lovely openings in Ingrand, where they don’t speak in phlegm and poetry._ > Sonia appeared to be dismissing the two men, despairing of Sycamore and society and the state of humankind, no doubt, though it was all but impenetrable to everyone but Ellie, who had drifted over to guide her friend back to work.

The entire event took, perhaps, ten minutes at most. But his mounting awareness of his pulse and the electric response of overtaxed nerves seemed to make the minutes stretch longer than they should.

Settling Lamium’s ball on his belt, Sycamore chatted politely with Blaise to the elevator, and excused himself.

Once safely tucked away from anyone else, and without the distraction of conversation, however, the exhaustion and pain left him leaning palely against the railing, pouting at his wrist as if that would in any way help. Perhaps he should have asked if anyone had any anti-inflammatories on hand. Too late now, though.

Maybe he really ought to take that weekend getaway with Lamium. It could be considered a working vacation, and it might be good for him to avoid the lab for a little while. Try to sleep more regularly.

The elevator chimed merrily, and Sycamore all but tossed himself past the double doors, and smacked blindly and directly into someone’s chest.

Given his own not insubstantial height, and the general width of the chest, he might have put two and two together and come up with a name, but he was somewhat distracted by biting down on a pained screech. Hopefully whatever noise snuck out could be misconstrued as having the breath knocked out of him.

A black suit trimmed in exceptionally intense red swam into focus behind a few unfortunately welled tears, and recognition sank in. Oh, that was right, it was Wednesday! And probably 11h30, time for their midweekly lunch.

Sycamore grinned brightly up at Lysandre, ignoring the fact that he must look rumpled and exhausted, and probably his eyes were swollen. The least he could do was lower his injured arm- slowly, slowly- and try to be enthusiastic. He rolled neatly onto his toes to press his mouth to the air in the general vicinity of Lysandre’s unnecessarily distant cheek, and said, “Lysandre, mon ami, a pleasure to see you again, as ever!”

All right. His tone was, possibly, maybe, too enthusiastic. Lysandre was staring down at him with that disgruntled look he often got when faced with politicians, salespeople, and other avoidance experts. “Since you clearly have neither slept nor washed, have you at least eaten since breakfast yesterday?”

"Well," Sycamore began, uninjured hand sneaking up to scratch at the back of his head as he failed completely to maintain eye-contact. It was as good as an admission of guilt, and only required about half the investment of shame. "We’re going to eat now, aren’t we? So, I will have done very soon!"

Sometimes, Sycamore was very grateful that Sonia and Lysandre did not get along in the slightest. If ever they sought to combine their disapproving looks, they might shame the entire region into a dictatorship before the year was out. But the distraction of his aching wrist and the blurred edge to his thoughts from lack of sleep gave him an fairly high resistance to the entire involvement, and he shrugged with one shoulder.

Lysandre huffed and turned quickly, shoes clacking briskly against the tiles and leaving Sycamore to follow. Perhaps with anyone else, the gesture might have been misinterpreted as dismissive, but Sycamore caught up easily, and nudged his shoulder- injured too, he realized only after he’d started the gesture, but it was subtle enough a motion for him to only breathe out of his nose a little too hard- against Lysandre’s arm playfully. “And what about you, hmm? Pulling any all nighters working on this grand technological innovation all the papers are on about?”

"Why do you insist on reading newspapers? You may very well be the last person under seventy five in the entire region."

"Ah, that’s not an answer! You’re just as guilty as I am, then!"

"I most certainly am not." The tone Lysandre took suggested the matter was closed, but then he was continuing anyway. "Nor would I allow my staff access to the labs in the middle of the night without prior notification. Perhaps if you took my offer, you’d actually begin to sleep regularly."

Sycamore could hardly help himself, the laughter just bubbled up without warning or excuse. It was always like that, when it came to the matter of his sleeping. He could hardly remember the last time he’d abided by an actual schedule. Where would he even find the time? “If you threw me out of the labs, then I would just have to find some fine young specimen to take home and study on my own time, you realize?”

"Somehow, I suspect you are referring equally to pokémon and women with that particular phrasing."

"Now, now, you’re being too conservative again! Maybe I mean to follow you home and dissect you! Or that horrendous man of yours, with the, the," Sycamore gestured vaguely at his scalp one handedly, marking out a halo and a ridiculously spiked tuft. "The hair thing. No, I couldn’t work for you, Lysandre. I’d have to do a hair thing too, and then where would we be? I’m meant to be the pretty one, you know!"

Sycamore considered it a victory when Lysandre was forced to rub at his temple in exasperation; they were both fully aware that the gesture existed more to hide the beginnings of a fond smile than to actually ease any tension. Nothing calmed people’s concerns about his health like flirtation. Although, admittedly, he was not usually nursing an actual, acute injury during the calming, which panged and sparked with every step he took. But that was fairly irrelevant to the point, which was. Something. Which he had forgotten.

"Will I regret it, do you think, if I have coffee with lunch, knowing that I’ve been thrown out of the lab and told to go directly to bed?" Sycamore asked, sounding more confused and lost in thought than he had meant. In his defense, it was difficult to keep any sort of firm grip on his deceptive tone, all considered. Lysandre was so difficult to lie to under the best of circumstances, it was reflex by now not to bother. And given how tired he was...

He jumped at the touch of warm fingers under his chin, unaware that he’d been yawning until his mouth clicked shut under the assault. But it did not end there, because Lysandre was tipping his head back manually, in the middle of the street. Some comment about romance novel maidens died half formed on against the back of his teeth, not that he would have been able to actually say it given the physical facts. But it might have been nice to at least finish the thought, without swallowing it down in a wash of sudden hyper awareness. That was the danger with befriending hunters with steel in their minds: sometimes you ended up the prey.

"Professor Sycamore," Lysandre began, against which Sycamore at least had the wherewithal to make a small noise of complaint. That it earned him the reprieve from those unreasonably blue eyes thanks to their rolling skywards was an added bonus. "Augustine. How, exactly, did you manage to bruise your chin?"

The back of Lysandre’s hand finally fell away, freeing Augustine to speak, and speak he did. A little too quickly. “Well, you know, I had hoped you wouldn’t notice, given the angle and all. But it is very slightly possible that I fell in the lab today, which is why my team threw me out, given that I clearly presented something of a health hazard to myself and others?”

The words ran together into one long question, as though he were seeking approval for this story and, mon legende, he was exceptionally tired, wasn’t he?

The clenched, twitching muscles in Lysandre’s jaw were just barely visible over the line of his beard, and though the Café Soleil was well within view and perhaps another three minutes walk at most, Lysandre had already moved towards the road, hailing a cab with one hand and pulling a phone from his suit pocket with the other. “Mable, please have the latest testers’ reports compiled for me when I return. I will be at least an hour late.”

"Oh, no, no, you don’t have to do that!" Augustine managed, realization sinking in. But by then, Lysandre had already hung up, glaring at the unsuspecting cab driver with a thunderous expression.

"Professor," He invited, pulling the rear door open slowly, and with clear restraint. He followed Augustine a moment later, and gave the driver an address which, after further consideration, was definitely not Augustine’s own.

"Now, all that really isn’t necessary," He began, unsure whether he was addressing the cabbie or Lysandre. But Lysandre’s build and unforgiving eyes seemed to decide it for the driver, who pulled smoothly into traffic. "I can sleep perfectly well in my own bed."

"And would you, if I actually took you to your apartments, Professor? Or would you manage, somehow, to wander back into the living room and start watching documentaries with one eye closed, and scrawling increasingly incomprehensible notes?"

Augustine’s grimace and general lack of a response were more than answer enough, and that might have been the end of things. Certainly the bulk of the remaining ride passed in a familiar silence. But the driver then took the final roundabout with considerable speed, probably in his haste to get the still glowering Lysandre out of his vehicle. The movement had Sycamore sliding across the bench seat sharply, injured wrist crushed neatly between his knee and Lysandre’s thigh.

The starburst of pain robbed him entirely of the ability to actually make a sound, vision falling entirely out of focus for a moment, though he was fairly sure that the grey on the edges didn’t crawl all the way through, and he probably hadn’t fainted. As his tensed muscles loosened, a sharp keen made itself audible on his slow, laboured exhalation. He did not actually recognize it as coming from himself, as he was still entirely too consumed with shudderingly removing his injured wrist from its little crypt of horrors. He moved to pull the long sleeve of his lab-coat back slowly, only to find that it had been done for him.

Oh. Right.

Lysandre.

He was going to be furious about this.

Augustine swallowed slowly, and the whining sound stopped. He turned, with a shaky, undoubtedly pathetic smile to look at Lysandre and gauge his reaction. Unfortunately, there did not seem to be a reaction to gauge. Lysandre was staring pointedly at Augustine’s wrist, which had taken on a lovely blue-black hue in places as the bruising really settled in. He had the most bizarre urge to take a picture, though whether of the bruises or the completely uncomprehending look on Lysandre’s face, he hadn’t quite decided.

The car had stopped moving, but no one seemed willing to react for a long moment. Not until the driver cleared his throat nervously, at which point Lysandre’s mask of blank confusion shattered into a terse formality as he paid and tipped the man handsomely, and bustled Augustine out onto the sidewalk in front of Lysandre’s building. Which, he had learned early on, was not a misnomer. The penthouse contained his personal residence in the city of Lumiose, but the entire fourteen floor construction was, at least nominally, his.

In the wake of the cab’s retreating tires, Lysandre finally managed a strained, “You aren’t hiding a broken wrist from me, are you?”

"Nonsense, my friend! Merely a sprain." Augustine was trying for convivial, soothingly energetic, but all that seemed to be coming out was a general malaise, fuzzy with exhaustion. He was unfairly aware, now, of not only his wrist but the slice in his cheek that he had bitten during the fall too. Talking seemed more effort than it was worth, and yet, it also seemed imperative.

He blinked, and appeared to have made the entire voyage from the sidewalk to Lysandre’s coat closet in the interim. Lysandre was neatly hanging their jackets where he had been staring down with disapproval the moment before. That didn’t bode well. Had he lost consciousness or merely his focus? He definitely needed to sleep. That was no longer up for debate. Maybe if he’d been able to sneak an espresso and some kind of obscenely sweet pastry it might have been staved off for a few more hours. But now exhaustion was clamouring at the edges of his skull, oozing out his eyes in stinging bites every time he blinked.

The next span of time between blinks was not quite as long, though it did involve him realizing vaguely that he was not going to be able to unbutton his shirt with one shaking hand. It was simply not in the cards. It had been his intention, at that point, to simply collapse into the large, neat bed presented to him fully clothed, and not question anything from the press of buttons in his chest to the fact that last time he’d been here the guest bed had been dressed in red and gold, not black and blue.

But that was also not, apparently, in the cards. Lysandre was frowning down at him again, though not with the same look of betrayal and anger as seconds- minutes?- before on the sidewalk. He was also deftly flipping Augustine’s buttons open with apathetically steady hands. He untucked Augustine’s shirt, pulled it down his arms, and laid it across one forearm before generously and perfunctorily unbuttoning and unzipping his slacks as well. Augustine wasn’t sure if the fact that they then clung to his hips was helpful or unfortunate. It was so difficult to tell things like that around Lysandre, to say nothing of his inability to actually form coherent thoughts at this point.

"Finish undressing and get in the bed, Augustine." Lysandre commanded. Generally, Augustine was impervious to Lysandre commanding things, except in good natured jest. But this whole circumstance seemed bizarre and he was beginning to forget what he was doing again, so it seemed for the best that he obey. It only took one attempt at moving his left hand, however, before he recalled with white-edged clarity exactly what had happened to his wrist, groaning at the injury. With the brief spark of coherence, he looked around for Lysandre, only to realize he was somewhere else now. The guest bedroom was also distinct from the guest bedroom of Augustine’s admittedly hazy memories, however. For one thing, it was larger. For a second, there appeared to be an attached bathroom, with lights on, off in the corner. That would explain the change in bed then.

Augustine finished shimmying out of his slacks as the fog started sliding back into his thoughts, and he removed his boxers with the ease of habit, sliding himself into the unfamiliar bed slowly, careful of his wrist, which was throbbing maniacally.

Some time later, though he couldn’t precisely estimate what amount of time, he swam back into disconnected awareness to realize that his arm was being bandaged tightly, and attempted a smile in the general direction of his bandager, who was very large and very red. Further on, his eyes flickered open to discover that the room was significantly darker, and that the bandager- Lysandre, the name bubbled up through syrupy thoughts, followed by distant recognition- was now standing at the far side of the bed, looking down at him. There was probably an expression there. Augustine just gurgled at it blankly, then managed to suggest, he thought, probably, that Lysandre should stop standing there being creepy. If he was going to sleep too, then he should come and sleep, obviously.

Or it was possible that he just made a few nonsense noises and burrowed into the sheets more deeply. Really, it could have gone either way. He didn’t care that much, already sliding back under.

The next time consciousness rapped lightly at his forehead, it was because a cold blue light had eaten up the room, along with a quiet buzzing, like very angry but very small beedrills compressed into a box. The city behind the gauzy curtains was still dark, yellow grey with streetlights, and once the buzzing was taken away, completely silent as it only ever was during the horrible hours between the students going to sleep and the salary-men waking up.

These were not hours Augustine enjoyed unless he had already been up at the start of them, so when a warm, deep voice told him to go back to sleep, he slid his limbs around the source and obeyed it readily. It wasn’t as if this was the first arbitrary voice saying things in his bed at frighteningly early hours, after all. The fact that this one registered as affectionate and familiar only made it easier to trust.

The hot hand combing through his hair as he did so was probably imaginary, but he pushed his head into it all the same.

The final time he woke up, the room was diffusely bright again, and he had the deep, throbbing muscle aches of having slept entirely too long, with the sore bladder and painfully dry mouth to match. He forced himself to blink open his eyes, taking in the room around him, and before his thoughts had entirely caught up, had buried himself in the warm side he barely even realized he had curled himself around. Usually he had better sense than to pass out in a random lover’s home for the long, comatose sleeps that followed staying awake for days on end.

"Where am I, then? Still in the city, I hope?"

The huff was not quite a laugh, but the body tensed up under his arm and leg in much the same way. “I believe that was the most sleep drunk I have ever seen you.”

Abruptly, his memory kicked back into functionality. Unfortunately, it was not quite enough to stop him from smacking his tightly bandaged wrist against Lysandre’s elbow as he jerked away from him, shoulders first. The pain was muted by the bandages, but it helped force him further into wakefulness. Sleep had left his eyes blurry and unwilling to focus, but it wasn’t as if there were that many people who could be made up of large halos of red and cream with spots of blue in the middle.

"Oh, Uxie and all her sisters," Augustine muttered, blinking furiously until things fell into at least a working focus, and he was left staring at Lysandre, fully aware that he must look completely terrified. But whatever it was that made him feel like a newborn deerling staring at a hungry arcanine, it was not on Lysandre’s face. He seemed primarily amused by the entire circumstance. "I don’t remember doing anything stupid, did I do anything stupid, I would dearly, dearly like not to have done-"

Augustine squinted leaning closer in to Lysandre again, with the most perturbed feeling in his chest. He flicked his blurry vision down to what he now realized was a book in Lysandre’s hands, laid across the comforter over his lap. Then back up to his face. Book, face, book, face.

"I’m sorry, we’ll address this whole mess momentarily but, are you wearing reading glasses?"

 


End file.
